Electrolux Team Roll Up Their Sleeves

Brussels may not be the home of culinary excellence (although a year-long food festival titled Brusselicious may prove me wrong), but it is the home of our Electrolux clients and their Electrolux and AEG showrooms.

While visiting the Electrolux team for an annual wash-up session, we were treated to a cooking workshop to give us a taste of AEG’s appliances and do a little team bonding along the way.

We were greeted by the ebullient “my-AEG-oven-is-so-great-it’s-orgasmic” Gabi, who put us to work chopping and dicing like professionals.

We chopped chives like troopers, mixing the greenery into a bowl of butter and garlic – a concoction we’d be using to stuff prawns. These would be our appetizers, which we’d be cooking ourselves using the *gestures provocatively like shopping channel assistant* AEG ProCombi oven using steam and heat.

Once in the oven, there was no time to sit back and relax – we were immediately tasked with preparing the main course: steak with turnip mash and baked apples with berry coulis, accompanied by the world’s most alien-looking vegetable that wouldn’t look out of place in a landscape panorama of Socotra. It’s official name? Romanesco cauliflower, but for the purposes of this blog post I shall proceed to call it the Spiky Green Alien.

The steak was on the griddle (that would be an AEG induction hob we’re using) and a lengthy debate ensued: exactly how long should a steak cook before you flip it? You could barely hear the steaks sizzle over the zealous voices and the cracking of MD and steak-enthusiast Andy’s knuckles as he anxiously looked on (it turned out all right, didn’t it Andy?)

Dinner was served: we could finally sit down to enjoy our steak with turnip mash, baked apple and Spiky Green Alien with a glass of wine.

But not for long – desert was up and as a self-diagnosed sugar addict, I believe it’s the most important meal of the day. But by this time we’re all a little glassy-eyed and, let’s be honest, lazy. So Gabi is left slaving over the stove (that would be the AEG ProCombi oven again) as we expectantly await our pudding: chocolate fondant with cream.

We roll back to Grand Place clutching our bellies and mentally designing our new AEG kitchens. The next day we leave Brussels narrowly escaping a blizzard (okay, a light dusting of snow, but still), better chefs than we had arrived.